Sunday, June 14, 2009

It's our six year wedding anniversary today.

Yeaaaaah!! Love is in the air... along with a whole lot of water.

Six years ago today, on a Saturday the 14th... (day after you-know-what) my DH and I invited our close friends and family to a celebration of our marriage, which, they all thought, had happened the previous month in an odd and disappointing eloping to the Sevierville, TN Smoky Mountains.

Well, it didn't happen then or there.We had a surprise wedding.

But the real surprise was the uninvited guest... four inches of rain within 30 minutes.

It wouldn't have been so bad if the location of the wedding a.) wasn't planned for outside and b.) if we weren't situated at the bottom of a freshly cleared very tall and very steep hillside that was cleared to replant the Monte Cassino Vineyard. (see previous Easter video for the planted hillside.)

In a word: 'BuildAnArk'.

The water was pouring down the hillside, and the pressure of the moisture coming through the rock walls was making the water squirt sideways through the retaining walls.

We didn't get any good pictures of the actual monsoon, I think we were all just too stunned. The pictures above are looking out the front door onto the veranda where we planned to serve hors d'oeuvres. The water/mud almost made it into the foyer.

We had tents outside to keep the sun off of guests. We thought they were waterproof. They weren't.

Sister of the groom: "What's plan B?"Groom: "This IS plan B."

Needless to say, once the rain stopped, cleared out the humidity, we quickly had dinner around the pool, and then, just as dessert was to be served, the rains started again.

So we had our guests grab their spoons and head back into the house, where we made our announcement.

"We didn't want to get married without all of you there.... so we didn't.... but now that we have you all together, we thought we'd do it now."

And so we did. Thanks to all of our accomplices: Ab, Andrea, Rob, Steve, and Pete.

Home Sweet

Home Sweet... um... HOME!

(it may need more paint, some trim, and the wrought iron fence installed, but it's no longer "Home Sweet Derelict")

We've been happily married since 2003, together since 2000, and we thought to ourselves, "Hey, let's test the limits of our relationship!" So we're in the process of totally rehabbing an uninhabitable 1868 brick home in Covington Kentucky, for better or for worse, richer or poorer, until one of us kills the other one -- or the renovation project gets finished, of course.

This is our chronicle of our journey into rehabbing/renovation. This blog will hopefully prove to be a resource or even a DIY "renovators' manual" for those who come after us.

Our backgrounds:

She is a creative MBA who got the entrepreneurial bug in 2000, and joined her yet-to-be husband in business. While she has always been handy and crafty, Wife has no professional experience in any of the building trades, nor did any of her immediate family.

He is a long time entrepreneur and newsletter publisher. Not particularly crafty, Husband is reasonably handy and prior to this has had some experience doing stone work, repairing and rebuilding decks and doing smaller repair projects around the house.

In other words, we're rank amateurs figuring this stuff out as we go along.